Meet Dr. Steve Rose
Steve is highly respected for his expertise and tireless commitment to finding treatments and cures for vision-robbing retinal diseases.
Archive for April, 2012
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This blog has been a great new way for the Foundation to report on timely and unique topics related to retinal research. Just as important, is that it provides you, our
readers, the opportunity to offer your valuable feedback — questions, comments and suggestions — to these important topics.
An Incremental but Important Step in Stem Cell Transplantation
A highly-magnified image of photoreceptors, also known as rods and cones, in the human retina.
So, here I am catching up on some journal reading, when Nature sends out an eblast touting new exciting advances in stem cell work, including a paper about the eye. Of course, I immediately jump to the site and find a research paper published online that reports on the modestly successful transplantation of precursor rod cells — cells that are more developed than stem cells but not quite mature rod cells — into mice with night blindness (congenital stationary night blindness). While vision improvement was not dramatic, the treated mice did see better in dim lighting; they were able to navigate a water maze in greatly reduced light much better than untreated mice. Read more
If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ve heard a lot about clinical trials. They’re the last series of steps in the testing process that potential treatments – whether drug, gene therapy or stem-cell – must go through before they can be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. Clinical trials are experiments, and you can’t conduct a sound experiment without the right subjects – in this case, human beings. Read more
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Are you excited about the new 3D version of the movie Titanic? I’m not. To me, it’s just 194 minutes of Kate and Leonardo running around a big ship together until it hits a big iceberg. Spoiler alert: One of them doesn’t make it. If I were a movie critic, I’d give it a “meh.”
Another Promising Bionic Retina
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Last February, I blogged about the emergence of “bionic” or artificial retinas for restoring some vision in people who are blind from retinal diseases. In that post, I featured Second Sight’s vision-restoring device, the Argus II, which is now on
the market in Europe and, hopefully, soon in the United States.
Read more